Proto, p.5
Proto, page 5
In time, the smiths added gold to their repertoire. It was panned out of the rivers that rose in the nearby Balkan Mountains, probably using fleeces, and brought to Varna as grains or nuggets. Ground up and suspended in an emulsion, it was painted on ceramics (the same technique was used with powdered graphite to produce stunning geometric designs in black and gold). Smelted to remove impurities, it was cast into jewellery and sceptres or other symbols of power. And besides gold and copper, there was a third commodity that was vitally important to Varna: salt. Farming communities used this mainly for conserving food, and some have argued that demand for it was so dependably high that it was salt rather than metals that made Varna rich. Up the River Provadia, which flowed into Lake Varna, a productive salt spring attracted its own walled settlement complete with shrine and cemetery. Here, in an industrial-scale operation, ceramic bowls were filled with brine and placed in giant ovens to accelerate the water’s evaporation.
By 4500 BCE, the Copper Age societies of south-eastern Europe had reached the zenith of their wealth and influence. Their mastery of pyrotechnology, for which they must have developed a vocabulary, had put them in a league of their own. And what they produced, others wanted. Grave goods resembling those at Varna and Durankulak, including gold jewellery with some of the same motifs, have been unearthed from contemporary cemeteries on Georgia’s coast and at Trabzon in north-eastern Türkiye. More astounding still, in a world before wheels, the Balkan miracle found its way deep into the steppe. Copper traced to one of the principal mines supplying Varna was adorning the bodies of the dead at Khvalynsk, an important ritual centre two thousand kilometres (twelve hundred miles) to the north-east, on the banks of the Volga. The copper ornaments in the Khvalynsk cemetery were more crudely made than those at Varna, suggesting that the copper was smelted in the Balkans, then transported in the form of small rods or ingots to its destination. There it was reheated (at this point lower temperatures sufficed), flattened into sheets using hammers of stone and antler, and turned into ornaments using chisels – beaver incisors set into bone handles.
How those rods or ingots were transported over such large distances is not clear. There were no wagons yet, but couriers could have carried small packages overland (the journey from Varna to Khvalynsk could have been completed in about a month on foot). Larger ones might have been loaded into dugout canoes. Though no remains of canoes have been definitively identified on the Black Sea’s west coast, from this period, miniature models of them have, and archaeologists assume that some kind of vessel must have been in use there, for transport and fishing, since the bones of dolphins, seals and even whales have been found at Durankulak.
A large canoe six metres (twenty feet) in length could have carried up to four people and the equivalent of two men’s weight in cargo. The copper could have travelled from the Black Sea to the Volga via the waterways of the Kuma-Manych Depression and then inland to Khvalynsk. Oxen, by now beasts of burden, could have dragged the heavy canoes upstream on the return journey. On the capricious Black Sea, however, seaborne trade would have been restricted to a short summer season, and even then such a vessel would not have strayed beyond shallow coastal waters. (Fisherfolk out of the Turkish port of Sinop have a saying: ‘The Black Sea has only three safe harbours: July, August and Sinop.’)
Who were the couriers – and what language did they speak? Who were those mysterious people who travelled so far, risking ambush by hostile tribes, not to mention the wild animals that skittered or lumbered into their path? Woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses had vanished with the last of the ice, but they still had bears, lynx, wild boar, aurochs and lions to contend with. Lion’s teeth, pierced so that they could be worn as pendants, have been found in burials from this period around the Black Sea. The American archaeologist David Anthony, whom we met in the Prologue, has long argued that steppe societies dispatched their chiefly elite on this perilous mission.
Anthony figures among the most ardent and imaginative sleuths of the Indo-European languages of the last half-century, and the first to appreciate that ancient DNA would rewrite their story. But it’s through the archaeological record that he detects the rise of this elite, and in particular through the steppe tribes’ changing death rites. The hunter-fishers of the Dnieper Rapids had buried their dead in communal pits with not much more than a few deer or fish teeth to embellish their corpses. Once herding had infiltrated the steppe, burials remained communal, but certain individuals began to stand out in the mass graves by virtue of their eye-catching regalia, including caps and breastplates made of flattened boar’s tusks, and belts of mother-of-pearl. Copper beads of Balkan provenance appeared, signifying status. Later on, steppe cemeteries shrank and the dead began to be buried singly, sometimes under small earthen mounds known as kurgans.[8]
By 4400 BCE similar kurgans had appeared in the Lower Danube Valley, very close to the northernmost copper-working settlements. They contained a great deal of copper, but also curious polished stone objects carved in the shape of horses’ heads. These strange objects also crop up in settlements from the Balkans to Khvalynsk. Anthony interprets them as the heads of maces or clubs, the type of weapon that a chief might wield. Others see them as tools for polishing metal and infer that the steppe envoys were artisans. Whoever they were, it probably wasn’t only men moving around the Black Sea at that time. Mitochondrial DNA, the kind that passes from mother to child, has been found in burials at Khvalynsk that originated in Balkan populations. And there are hints that women and children were moving in the other direction too.
One of the most intriguing such cases is that of a five-year-old girl who was buried with lavish grave goods in the Varna cemetery itself. Geneticists later retracted their conclusion that she was related to the steppe tribes, on the grounds that her DNA may have become contaminated. But despite the enduring question mark over her ancestry she remains the subject of intense speculation because of her unusual diet. In the farming societies of the Balkans, meat typically formed a smaller proportion of people’s diet than it did on the steppe, and women ate less of it than men. Yet more than half the girl’s diet consisted of meat, a higher proportion than characterised most of the men around her, including the chief in Grave 43. Could she have been the child of high-status immigrants, the daughter of a chieftain hailing from the steppe?
The individuals buried under the kurgans north of the Danube appear to have been pretty diverse genetically. Some carried ancestry from the steppe, some carried local farming or hunter-gatherer ancestry, others carried mixtures of all three. One way of interpreting this diversity is to posit that the first steppe emissaries found local imitators who acted as middlemen in the copper trade, or local wives with whom they had children who, once grown, took up that role. The coveted metal may have passed through a chain of intermediaries, each of whom travelled a relatively short distance to convey it. Whatever was given in exchange has not survived, but it may have been perishable. Among the commodities that have been proposed are animal skins, cured meats and steppe plants with medicinal or hallucinogenic properties. (It’s possible that nothing was given, in which case ‘exchange’ becomes ‘theft’, but scholars think this unlikely because of the durability of the trade network through time, and the genetic and cultural mixing that accompanied it.)
The more tantalising question, from the point of view of this story, is what language the couriers and their suppliers negotiated in (and what language the little girl’s death rites were pronounced in). The languages spoken around the Black Sea at the end of the last ice age are, sadly, beyond the reach of linguists’ reconstructions. We can nevertheless be close to certain that, before they entered into their long-distance exchange activities, the steppe dandies with their mother-of-pearl belts and the gilded incumbent of Grave 43 had no language in common. It is also clear that the customers from the steppe must have lacked a lexicon of metalwork and smelting, at least to begin with, since they also lacked the technology.
In all of recorded history, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single example of human beings trading in high-value goods without an effective means of communication. Usually what has happened, in situations where the parties initially lack a common tongue, is that they have developed a lingua franca or shared language of commerce. The eponymous Lingua Franca, the supposed ‘Language of the Franks’, was spoken in Mediterranean ports from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century.[9] (It was probably spoken earlier, before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, just not written down for a long time.) It developed out of Latin, but not the classical Latin of Livy or Tacitus, the ‘vulgar’ form spoken by ordinary, mostly illiterate people – the soldiers, sailors, colonists and enslaved people who frequented those ports. It was endlessly disparaged by the urban elite, precisely because it was a language of faraway places, of souks and brothels and cockfights. It was a chameleon, taking on the colours of Italian, Catalan, Occitan or any of the other emerging Romance languages, depending on where it was spoken and by whom. In the hundreds of Roman colonies of North Africa, it was strongly influenced by Arabic (‘sugar’, ‘artichoke’ and ‘zero’ are three of many Arabic words that entered English via the Lingua Franca).
It is likely that a lingua franca was also in use in the Black Sea region five thousand years earlier. We can only speculate as to what it sounded like, but some scholars have proposed that an ancestor of all the Indo-European languages was that lingua franca – that this ancestor gained an early foothold as a language of trade, eventually being adopted by many of the populations involved in that trade. Linguists are mostly unenthused by this idea. They point out that lingua francas are tightly tethered to the activity for which they were forged, tending to exist alongside their speakers’ mother tongues without replacing them. Becoming a lingua franca is not, in itself, a recipe for world domination.
Nevertheless, many linguists do agree that an Indo-European ancestor was probably the mother tongue of one of the partners in that Copper Age trade network – the language of the couriers from Trabzon or Colchis on the Georgian coast, perhaps, or of those who hailed from the steppe via the Rivers Volga and Don. They think this mainly because, in order to have produced the degree of divergence that they see between all known branches of the Indo-European family, the common ancestor must already have been spoken by then. And since we know that the Black Sea network operated for hundreds of years, that women moved through it and that children were born of mixed parentage, there would have been time for generations to grow up who spoke more than one of the languages involved in the copper trade, in addition to the lingua franca. These bi- or plurilinguals, who as natural mediators might have become wealthy and powerful in their own right, would also have acted as conduits for the influence of one language on another. Through them, the Indo-European ancestor might have absorbed words, sounds, meanings and grammatical constructions from the other languages in the network (while donating its own to them). If that is what happened, then the Indo-European languages that we speak today contain echoes of the Pontic seaboard as it accosted traders’ ears over six thousand years ago.
Around 4400 BCE, signs of strain began to appear among the farming societies of south-east Europe. A site called Tell Karanovo, two hundred and fifty kilometres (one hundred and fifty miles) south-west of Varna, was abandoned.[10] Starting with the first farmers to settle the Balkans more than two thousand years earlier, people had built and rebuilt on that site almost without interruption, until finally, in the late Copper Age, they vanished. Slavchev says that he never feels the past weigh on him so heavily as at Karanovo. You can stand in a trench there today and let your eye wander up twelve metres (forty feet) of compacted human debris: the trash of a civilisation that lasted longer than Christianity so far.
Hundreds of settlements followed Karanovo into oblivion, many of them apparently burned by their inhabitants before they left. Within two centuries Varna had stopped producing its glittering marvels and its cemetery had fallen into disuse. Europe wouldn’t regain its social and technical heights for over a thousand years. The Spondylus shells that the farmers had treasured when they were still in the Near East, and exchanged like charms ever since, were now the opaque shibboleths of a vanished world. At about the same time, Balkan copper more or less disappeared from steppe graves, and its couriers disappeared from the Balkans. It is possible that the steppe tribes had become dependent on the metal, that its distribution in the form of rewards and tributes had become a vital means of keeping the peace among them, and when it dried up peace broke down. At any rate, there were no more sacrifices at Khvalynsk, and no more feasts. The shamans fell silent.
The balance of power was shifting in the Black Sea region, and the linguistic landscape with it. The Indo-European ancestor evolved and fragmented as its speakers’ circumstances changed. And as it expired, its daughters entered the scene.
Alexey Nikitin hails from the village of Pochuyky, where steppe shades into forest-steppe south-west of modern Kyiv. His wife grew up across the street from him. Both played as children in the shadow of a vast earthen mound, the tomb of a Scythian warrior who died in the first millennium BCE. These days the mound is unimpressive; farmers have ploughed it nearly flat. But when Nikitin was five years old, he says, ‘You could see it for miles.’
Pochuyky existed long before the Scythians arrived. One of the oldest continuously settled places in Ukraine, it lies in a corridor through which farmers from the west and herders from the east advanced and retreated over thousands of years. Nikitin, a palaeogeneticist, considers that his blood contains traces of all of them. He’s the latest in a long line of migrants, and is used to moving on when things get tough. These days he works in the United States, at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University, but the burial mound at Pochuyky still looms large in his imagination. He thinks deeply about the boundary that it marks, and how its meaning has changed over time.
Forest-steppe describes the band of sparse woodland that separates the forests of northern and western Eurasia from the treeless steppe, and it traverses modern Ukraine. When Varna was thriving, that ecological boundary coincided with a cultural one – the boundary between farmers and herders. The cultural divide was in turn reinforced by anatomical differences, with the gracile farmers and the taller, more robust herders still able to distinguish each other at fifty paces, and we can be fairly sure that different languages were spoken either side of it. Around 4200 BCE, however, the climate began to change, and the ecological boundary to slide.
Conditions grew cooler and drier around the Black Sea. Grassy steppe encroached on forest, expanding grazing opportunities for herders and making it easier for them to move around because rivers were fordable for longer. Life became tougher for farmers, on the other hand, since without rain their crops failed. One year of drought is survivable for the average farming community that sagely keeps grain in reserve. Two or three in a row can spell hardship, and they were now experiencing sustained periods of drought. It seems likely that, to add to their woes, their salt springs dried up. Control of this lucrative industry shifted to the populations living around the estuaries and lagoons further north. In the Dniester Delta, south of modern Odesa, the salt simply dries out on the flats; all you have to do is pick it up.
People began to leave Varna and the other Balkan settlements and move north, following the salt. In the lands beyond the Danube they would have encountered tribes living a more mobile lifestyle. To feed their families, some farmers may have converted to that lifestyle. (The evidence for this is that, in the Balkan uplands, no settlements were built for five hundred years following the collapse of the farming communities.) But they would have been novices at it: they didn’t know how to manage large herds, or where the best pastures lay, or when those pastures were at their most succulent. They would have had to draw closer to the ancestral foe to survive. They might have started speaking a steppe language, no hardship for those who were already bilingual. But the power dynamic had switched: now they were the underdogs, the ones asking.
At some Copper Age Balkan sites, though not at Karanovo or Varna, there is evidence of extreme violence just before they were abandoned: massacres that spared no man, woman or child. This violence wasn’t restricted to the Balkans. The archaeological record attests to growing tensions across Neolithic Europe at this time – manifesting, for example, in ever more robust fortifications around settlements – and these only intensified over the next few centuries. Knowing this changes the complexion of the strife in the Balkans. It could have been farmer-on-farmer, as climate change exacerbated social tensions within and between their communities, leading to scapegoating and feuds. David Anthony suspects that the steppe envoys may have delivered a final coup de grâce. Those peripatetic chieftains with their horse-head maces might have spied an opportunity to seize the means of production. It wouldn’t have taken much. If they harried the farmers in their fields until the latter no longer dared leave their stockades, hunger would eventually have forced them to flee. Those who took their place would have spoken different languages.
A strange thing now happened. People who had previously inhabited small villages in the forests of Romania and western Ukraine began to move across the forest-steppe boundary, into the then sparsely populated area between modern Kyiv and Odesa.[11] Migrating east as far as the right or western bank of the Dnieper, they built settlements that were up to twenty times the size of their old ones. These astonishing megasites, some of which may have been home to ten thousand people, have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. Some say they were simply farming villages that swelled as the population grew, others that they were refugee camps built to accommodate the farmers fleeing the calamity further south. Still others consider them a radical social experiment, proto-cities built along egalitarian lines.
